Join us on Friday September 8 at 7 pm at Motto Berlin for the launch of “Manufacturing Narratives,” the second issue of MAKAN.

MAKAN is a journal of culture and space that is edited and published by Think Tanger, an independent arts organization based in Tangier, Morocco. Its inaugural issue “Informal Utopias” was published in 2020 and established the foundations of MAKAN as a vehicle for critical engagement with contemporary architectural and urban conditions and with academic scholarship emanating from, or focused on exploring, Africa and the Arabic-speaking milieu. 

The second issue “Manufacturing Narratives,” focuses on how interrogating narrativity can provoke fundamental questions about how societies define or choose to accept societal or historical truths in today’s world. Contributors to the issue include: Ala Younis, Ali T. As’ad, Bari Abbassi, A. George Bajalia, Karim Kattan, Karima Kadaoui, Kenza Sefrioui, Lahbib El Moumi, Laila Hida, Maureen Mougin, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Monica Basbous, Nadia Tazi, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, Sonia Terrab, Soufiane Hennani, Yto Barrada.

The event will include presentations by the creative director of Think Tanger, Hicham Bouzid, and the editor of MAKAN Issue #2, Ali T. As’ad. The presentations will be followed by a conversation / Q&A moderated by Berlin-based urban researcher and performance artist Nancy Naser Al Deen. 

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Think Tanger

Motto Books

Mizna: The Black SWANA Issue, guest-edited by Safia Elhillo and produced by an all-Black takeover team, explores the infinitely varied and kaleidoscopic nature of the Black SWANA experience.

Mizna: The Black SWANA Issue features contributions by Fahad Al-Amoudi, Salma Ali, Shams Alkamil, Ladin Awad, Lameese Badr, Romaissaa Benzizoune, Dina El Dessouky, Atheel Elmalik, k. eltinaé, Samah Fadil, Shawn Frazier, Myronn Hardy, Fatma Hassan, Asmaa Jama, Marlin M. Jenkins, Abigail Mengesha, Suzannah Mirghani, Nihal Mubarak, Umniya Najaer, Sihle Ntuli, Abu Bakr Sadiq, Sagirah Shaheed, Charif Shanahan, Najma Sharif, Faatimah Solomon, Vanessa Taylor, Qutouf Yahia, Thawrah Yousif. Interview with Charif Shanahan. Visual art by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.

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Quilo – Journal of Photographic Tales from Brazil is the first ever publication of its kind, focusing solely on photographic projects created in Brazil. The 300-page magazine features over 40 photographers, visual artists, and short story writers from Brazil. Edited and self-published by University of Hartford Alumni, photographer and creative director, Mico Toledo and designed by design agency Porto Rocha in NY, the publication shines a light on the rich and diverse photographic talent and stories coming from within the borders of such a monumental country. Quilo’s ambitious attempt is to widen the photographic canon, to include a wide range of artistic voices and stories from Brazil, championing unseen stories from within the country, under threat from the previous 4 years of a right-wing conservative government, while also making these stories accessible to a wider audience in the United States, Europe and beyond.

Divided into regions of Brazil, the publication flows like a road trip through the many arteries that criss-cross the lengths of this monumental country; its three hundred pages take us on an odyssey from the far reaches of the North to the deepest South of Brazil. Unfolding through the eyes and minds of forty-four contemporary photographers and writers, the publication travels through towns and cities, mangroves and beaches, meets locals and encounters the often invisible tales this land holds, shining a light on counter-narratives, and turning them into powerful weapons against intolerance and bigotry.

Featuring photography from: Affonso Uchôa, André Cepeda, André Penteado, Camila Falcão, Camila Svenson, Celso Brandão, Cícero Costa, Coletivo Trëma, Desali, Diego Bresani, Edu Simões, Fabricio Brambatti, Felipe Russo, Fernanda Frazão, Gabo Morales, Gabriel Carpes, Gabriela Portilho, Giovana Schluter Nunes, Gui Galembeck, Igor Furtado, Jonathas de Andrade, Julio Bittencourt, Karoline Karlic, Marco Antonio Filho, Mico Toledo, Miguel Salvador, Ramírez-Suassi, Roberta Sant’Anna, Romy Pocz, Rodrigo Oliveira, Silvino Mendonça, Stefanie Moshammer, Tommaso Protti, Tuca Vieira, Titus Riedl, Valda Nogueira, Vincent Catala, Virginia de Medeiros, Vitor Casemiro, Yago Gonçalves

With written contributions from: Beatriz Bracher, Jarid Arraes, Jeferson Tenório, João Almino, Geovani Martins, Milton Hatoum

Design: PORTO ROCHA, Felipe Rocha, Leo Porto, Vitor Carvalho, Natalia Oledzka, Elisa Bortolini

Creative Director: Mico Toledo

Editor: Joanna Cresswell

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Mang Mang Magazine Vol. 1 is a Chinese-language independent magazine called “莽莽 Mang Mang” (meaning wild grass). The magazine includes articles, interviews, photos, and well-researched infographics documenting the recent wave of protests in China and in Chinese communities throughout the world that has led to the ending of the draconian Zero-Covid policy in China. Mang Mang Magazine Vol. 1 also deals with broader political and social issues (feminism, LGBTQ) and supports protests in Iran and Hong Kong, just to name a few.

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This special issue is the cataLog for Model Behavior, a group exhibition of models, architectural and otherwise, curated by the Anyone Corporation and presented by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York City. The exhibition, which ran October 4–November 18, 2022, questioned the role of the model in projecting or eliciting social behavior. In addition to documenting the 55 exhibited works with four-color images and project descriptions, the 160-page cataLog includes essays by curator Cynthia Davidson; by architecture theorists Jörg H. Gleiter, Kiel Moe, and Christophe Van Gerrewey; and by art historian Annabel Jane Wharton.

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MODEL BEHAVIOR

OCTOBER 4 – NOVEMBER 18, 2022

A GROUP EXHIBITION CURATED BY THE ANYONE CORPORATION AND PRESENTED BY THE IRWIN S. CHANIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AND ART

Models, whether physical or digital, are intrinsic to architecture. Just as science, mathematics, politics, economics, and other fields use models to visualize, reflect, and predict behaviors, so do architectural models. Model Behavior, a group exhibition curated by Log editor Cynthia Davidson, designed by New Affiliates (Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb), considered how architectural models contribute to shaping social behaviors. Model Behavior featured 70 works and objects by 45 artists and architects including artists Olafur Eliasson, Isamu Noguchi, Ekow Nimako, and Thomas Demand, and architects Peter Eisenman, Darell Wayne Fields, Greg Lynn, Forensic Architects (Eyal Weizman), First Office (Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood), MALL (Jennifer Bonner), Ensamble (Débora Mesa and Antón García-Abril), and Höweler and Yoon (Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon).

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Winter 2023

In this issue:

REHEARSAL
Cally Spooner

ANITA STECKEL
(A) Reconsidering Anita Steckel in the Age of Heteropessimism
Wendy Vogel
(B) Anita Being Anita
Dodie Bellamy, Rachel Middleman, Betty Tompkins

MANHATTAN MARXIST: I’VE GOT PRINCIPLES, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM, I’VE GOT OTHERS
Estelle Hoy

PRIMITIVE MAN
Amy Gerstler

TIDBITS (PART I)
Jordan/Martin Hell by Alex Bennett
Scott Covert by Sabrina Tarasoff
Erin Calla Watson by Jennifer Piejko
Stéphane Mandelbaum by Krzysztof Kościuczuk

The Margins of Events: Bruno Serralongue
Elisa R. Linn, Lennart Wolff

SEYNI AWA CAMARA: Tale of Tales
Eva Barois De Caevel

MELIKE KARA: Being without Ego
Sohrab Mohebbi

Books
Jenna Sutela

TIDBITS (PART II)
Abbas Zahedi by Alessandro Rabottini
George Tourkovasilis by Nicolas Linnert
B. Ingrid Olson by Brit Barton
Dala Nasser by Amy Jones

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Dear friends,

Motto is very excited to announce that Mizna Publications are now available as part of our catalogue. 

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Mission

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production, centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than twenty years, we have been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.

Named City Page’s Nonprofit of the Year in 2020 and a Regional Cultural Treasure in 2021, we publish Mizna, an award-winning SWANA lit and art journal; produce the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest running Arab film fest in the Midwest; and offer classes, readings, performances, public art, and community events, having featured over 400 local and global writers, filmmakers, and artists.

Vision

Mizna seeks to be a local, national, and international leader in providing excellent artistic platforms for emerging and established SWANA artists, connecting their work to engaged and thoughtful audiences.

Through Mizna, audiences have the opportunity to engage in the work of Arab and Muslim artists on its own terms. And our community has a critical opportunity to see some facet of their own experience reflected on the page or the screen.

History

Mizna was co-founded as a grassroots organization by Kathryn Haddad and Saleh Abudayyeh who identified a need for an artistic space dedicated to Arab and Muslim writers to narrate their own stories and make work on their own terms. Along with a small group of other Arab and Muslim writers, artists, and scholars, Kathy and Saleh established Mizna during vibrant time in the ‘90s when Asian and black Twin Cities artists and activists were creating collectives and working together to imagine a more socially just and representative arts scene.

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In this issue:

A River
“The story here is that nothing happens. There is no resolution. Things disappear. People disappear. The earth changes. I wake up to write.” Lisa Robertson pens a narrative, part of an untitled novel in progress, about decline and invisibility as freedom. It centers on an aesthetics of decay, bodily and urban, through memories of water—specifically the flooding and ebbing of the Bièvre river.

The Depression Artist
Through a writing process that offers a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature, K Allado-McDowell and GPT-3—the latter an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text—coauthor a satirical account of an artist who, having abandoned their brushes in favor of NFTs, finds themselves stuck in a reclusive and stale existence until an unidentified, rhythmic pulse rouses them.

Basement Jazz
In building an imaginary milieu for Dora Budor’s practice, Marina Vishmidt is drawn to the category of “infrastructure,” in the sense of both artists who poeticize or pattern voids into significant structure, and a transversal way of working that is attentive to the conditions of possibility in exhibition. In architectural, economic, linguistic, and organizational ways, Budor generates a transformation of gaps and absences.

Focus on: Fujiko Nakaya
Big Talk Is Talking about the Weather
Into Pure White Darkness: The Ecology of Fujiko Nakaya
An early member of Experiments in Art and Technology and a crucial figure for Japanese video art, Fujiko Nakaya is mostly known for her sculptural and installation ecosystems using fog. Here, Stuart Comer, Michelle Kuo, Astrida Neimanis, and Sarah Johanna Theurer discuss the artist’s environmental awareness, the poetics of the fog, and what it means to talk about the weather, while Reiko Setsuda retraces Nakaya’s collaborative and networked thinking. Nakaya’s approach does not objectify nature but treats the global environment as an organic ecosystem shaped by social, political, and technological relations.

Object-Oriented: Toward a Regeneration of Art Criticism as Literary Practice
Could the key to art criticism’s present-future redemption be found in the past? Travis Jeppesen muses on the origins of critical commentary, guiding our way through the dispute opposing “art criticism” and “art writing.” Via an analysis of different categories, such as meta- and ficto-criticism, Jeppesen debunks how a “poetics of indeterminacy” may grace and empower a form of art writing that is a vanguard practice within the wider genre of art criticism.

The House in Which We Live
Seamlessly moving from the page into sculpture, installation, and performance, and often focusing on histories of queer community, Caspar Heinemann responds to a short but significant period in British history with humor and irreverence, and with an intimate and melancholic material sensitivity. Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe reflects on Heinemann’s linguistic play with poetic negations and absences.

A Hypothesis of Resistance
In the first of a series of five essays aimed at examining the temporalities of performance, defying and eclipsing the standardization that drives individual and collective bodies to perform toward an entirely metric-oriented future, Cally Spooner intertwines the psoas major muscle; Donald W. Winnicott’s studies on developmental psychology; motherhood; and chrononormativity.

Concrete Poetry
Through installations that combine conceptual rigor with revolutionary poetry, Ignacio Gatica investigates the long shadow of neoliberalism in Chile. Harry Burke peruses how the weaknesses and contradictions of Chilean politics’ recent history interweave with Gatica’s practice, pointing to social movements whose demands extend beyond the constitutional forms of liberal democracy.

Tidbits:
Céline Mathieu by Leila Peacock; Jerzy Bereś by Krzysztof Kościuczuk; David Moser by Laura McLean-Ferris; Ayo Akingbade by Faridah Folawiyo; Steph Huang by Olivia Aherne; Selma Selman by Arnisa Caterina Zeqo; Simon Lehner by Christina Lehnert; Deborah-Joyce Holman by Olamiju Fajemisin; Francisco Tropa by Simone Menegoi.

Book Reviews by Whitney Mallett.

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Aren’t we all familiar with the deeply personal experience of waking up alone, in anguish and despair, from the depths of a nightmare? Whether it’s disordered sleeping, sleep paralysis or the more regular frightening dream, the night and its terrors have kept us occupied since the very beginning of humanity. For this issue of Simulacrum, we – together – delve into the furthest corners of our minds to discover the dark and disorienting meaning we might find there. But a nightmare is much more than something to be fearful of. The nightmare is entangled with our histories and can lead us to our deepest selves, by bringing up feelings which we don’t dare to feel in real life. It has provided many creators with inspiration for their art of many forms. As we will discover within this issue of Simulacrum, this personal aspect of the nightmare can lead to incredibly diverse approaches and interpretations that we hope will allow you to reconsider the meaning and feeling that nightmares can bring us.

Authors: Neža Kokol, Joyce Poot, Niels Noot, Jonas van Kappel, Jérémy Bernard, Kenneth Geurts, Denise van Rooij, Kim Mulder, Frank van der Wulp, Laure Vanrijckeghem, Sanne Kabalt.

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Featuring contributions by Grossi Maglioni, Christian Egger, Michiel Huijben & Harriet Foyster, Brittany Tucker, Gong Zhang, Geoffrey Garrison, Michaela Eichwald, Eugenia Lai, Alix Eynaudi, Monika Grabuschnigg, Carina Luksik, Steven Warwick, Mirjam Thomann.

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Edited and published by: Christian Egger, Christian Kosmas Mayer, Yves Mettler, Magda Tóthová, Alexander Wolff.

Chicago, Times, Plotter, Helvetica, DIN, Techno, Löhfelm, RR_02, Univers, Tiffany, Circuit, Memphis, Gringo, Zeus, The Mix, Princess Lulu, Pigiarniq, Paper, Libertine, Trixie, Déjà Vu, Auto, Rediviva, Acid, Wanda, Loraine, Hallo, Korpus, Spiegel, Zeitschrift, Fig, Museo, Lisa Fittko and Dyslexie are the 34 issues of the magazine founded in 2002 in Vienna by a group of Austrian, German and Swiss artists.

With 2 to 3 issues a year, the members of the team publish their magazine around their personal encounters and artistic interests.

Each issue present around fifteen contributions, in both texts and images. Artists, writers, scientists and specialists in all kind of fields are invited to contribute and intervene in a sober and efficient layout already acknowledged by the London Design Museum in its exhibition Best European Design 2005.

The focus of the editorial activity is organizing and assembling the contributions, including works and found footage by the editors, in order to create for each issue a strong and beguiling unity, amplified by the use of a different font for each issue. Each issue printed in black and white in an edition of 300 copies, is completed with a color centerfold poster by an internationally recognized artist (Kai Althoff, Elke Krystufek, Daniel Pflumm, Ayse Erkmen, Richard Hawkins, Amelie von Wulffen, Cameron Jamie, Renée Green, Jennifer West, Art & Language, etc…).

Apart of the publishing work, the team organizes for each issue a release party in a specific space, such as a panoramic bar, a wax museum, project spaces, other magazine’s editorial spaces, etc… inviting artists to perform or exhibit.

Broadening its network, the magazine gets invited into art spaces to which the team respond contextually: Multiple author wallpainting for a magazine fair, teamshow at Flaca in London, curated groupshow in Circuit, Lausanne, artists-in-residence in Copenhagen, lectures in galleries and workshops in universities, etc..

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